On Thu, 29 Sep 2016, William Denton wrote:

> I'm working on a big Org file on a slow machine, so I set 
> org-export-babel-evaluate to nil so exporting to PDF just generates the file 
> from what's in the buffer, without doing any calculating.
>

Actually it does a lot LESS than that.

The docstring notes that:

"When set to nil no code will be evaluated as part of the export
process and no header argumentss will be obeyed."

and advises:

"Users who wish to avoid evaluating code on export should use the header
argument ˇ:eval never-export˘."

which sounds like what you wanted.

Chuck